I do. I would do anything for them, but I draw the line at putting (many) other innocents to death for them. Sophie’s choice is real. That is the trade. If everybody thinks the way you do, we would all be a bunch of backwards tribalists.
On a side note, this type of thinking is what is killing the working class in America. Everybody in it for themselves.
What an absurd interpretation of his (?) argument. Straw-man much?
Why, yes it is. That’s kind if the motivation to invade foreign countries, to make them stop threatening your children.
I would have a hard time faulting someone trying to pay a ransom to get a loved one back. That sort of hardship doesn’t exactly enforce utilitarian thinking. That said, of all the shitty stuff my government does, not paying ransom to kidnappers and hostage takers is something I appreciate, and I am glad that the US government stopped ransom efforts (even if they could have been nicer about).
Playing the ransom game is a no-win game. The best case scenario is that you get your loved one back, and in the process murder tens or hundreds more people AND make it so that there is incentive for people to go out and grab other loved ones. Worse case scenario is all of the above except your loved one is also dead. Million dollar ransoms go a long way for a military made up with AK47s and trucks with 50 cals strapped to them. The number murders that a million dollar ransom can fund is potentially huge.
It is a real shame that this sort of utilitarian logic is applied to all counter terrorism. The Homeland Security budget would be an order of magnitude smaller and our cancer cures funding an order of magnitude greater if we applied the same logic.
It’s not necessarily right. Buying a slave to set him/her free makes that slave free. It is an immediate acknowledgment of the importance of that individual.
Decent people in civilized places try to save each-other. I know it’s unbelievable but they are very hopeful, helpful, and they do it.
Europe cares about it’s citizens - how often has it gotten them back to their families?
America cares about money and who is allowed to have what. America cares about punishment. Families get a horrific video of their son in a orange jumpsuit - an evil parody of our “law abiding” cruelty.
The economic gamesmanship behind not paying ransoms may be a winning strategy in the long term but codifying it into law denied this family their freedom to attempt one avenue to make themselves whole. The absolutism of saying you will never pay a ransom says you don’t actually care about citizens and individuals.
I would consider more than the “tone” of the officials telling this family they would go to jail for trying - I would consider the whole chain of certitude and ineptitude that has locked us into not having any good choices so often then tell us it’s the only way to think of things.
We know.
This ideal of the efficient and unemotional military is known as “bollocks”.
The number of times the ,military have prosecuted emotional responses with stony faces is pretty well documented.
Our guys are worth twice your guys sort of thing. In fact, the fewer our guys we get back for your guys the better.
Your antagonist has a different brain is all, Arguing is futile. I’d go with “Forget it, Col, it’s Chinatown” but it’s slightly inappropriate in the context.
What the US wants is a casus belli.
And that’s the difference between love and selfishness. There is very little I wouldn’t do for my family. But I would not put other people in the line of fire, or assist the cause of something deeply evil in order to spare them, because that would not be love. It would not be about my loved ones. It would be an act of pure selfishness. It would be using the ones I love as cover to justify doing something evil for my own personal needs, and I wouldn’t do that to them. what an awful thing it is, to be someone’s excuse.
And yet plenty of people do. Plenty of people faced with threats to their loved ones and their children make the choice to not become party to evil things.
I bring this up because there’s been a lot of stuff in this thread that outright states at the opposite is true, that having children means you would do anything, no matter how awful. But it’s not a universal fact, as can be evidenced by the news story that inspired this discussion.
I am a touch sensitive on this issue, because worlds away from the whole idea of ransom, back when I worked at the Girl Scouts, I remember long and interminable meetings dealing with the aftermath of the few bad volunteers who claimed that kind of logic as their excuse. The ones who had acted truly abominably (and who were not above using their kids as sticks to beat the world with) who justified every inappropriate thing with “who wouldn’t do anything for their children?” which always made me very angry, because actually, they were the minority, and it felt like an insult to everyone involved who some how managed to restrain themselves from screwing over other people under the guise of “MY CHILD”. And the kids themselves hated it, because they knew it was never actually about them, their needs, their wants, which- shockingly- did not involve screwing over other kids.
Unless ISIS was willing to make a drastic reduction in their asking price I doubt the family would have been able raise €100 million on its own.
What to do about hostages is a hard decision. European countries have been paying up, and have gotten their citizens back. However, this has made kidnapping a major source of money for terrorists. An estimated US$125 million has been paid to al Qaeda and affiliates since 2008, supplying maybe half their budget. Paying up also encourages future kidnapping:
Of the 53 hostages known to have been taken by Qaeda’s official branches in the past five years, a third were French. And small nations like Austria, Spain and Switzerland, which do not have large expatriate communities in the countries where the kidnappings occur, account for over 20 percent of the victims.
By contrast, only three Americans are known to have been kidnapped by Al Qaeda or its direct affiliates, representing just 5 percent of the total.
This only implies that you think an American’s life or your son’s life is worth more than the people terrorized by ISIS. What do you think they would use the money for? Feeding puppies? If you pay a ransom, you are arming a genocidal group. It is not ethical to do so, and the US government is right on this point.
It really makes me sick how many people are blind to this point. The millions of dollars spent by European countries to save their citizens have been used to fund mass murder. But they hide it and brush it off as not their problem, their citizens aren’t getting butchered and they get good PR when they come home. But then the US does the right thing by not funding murder and the only thing people can say is “how cruel!” It is amazing how they can miss the irony behind this statement (I assume it is their cultural imperialism and racism that blinds them).
Your family is not worth more than others. And if you don’t realize this then you lack a fundamental trait of human empathy. Once you realize that everybody’s family matters, then you realize how unethical imperialism is.
Does having that child come with a Ph.D. in international affairs?
From an ethical point of view there are two logical ways to approach this: Kantian ethics and Utilitarianism.
In Kantian ethics you would look at this generally. You would ask if the actions you would take could be generalized as a universal maxim for society. I think it is obvious they can’t. If everybody acted this way, you would divide the world between the rich (who could buy ransoms) and the poor who would suffer from terrorists who got the ransoms. Clearly, this is how the word exists today and I can’t think of anybody who considers it an ethical state of affairs. Rich people protecting themselves by paying ransoms to criminals who terrorize many more people is incredibly racist and imperialist. Another independent way to analyze this with Kantian ethics is to ask if human beings are always the ends and never just the means to an end. In the case of ransoms and the fact that great suffering will come from the money, it is obvious that the damage to people like the Yazidis would simply be a means to an end. And it is harder to think of a more grossly unethical statement than “the ends justify the means” when you are talking about people’s lives.
In Utilitarianism you would ask the question of what action would produce the greatest good for society. Sacrificing one rich life so many poor people aren’t killed is a very logical action. Spock, a great believer in Utilitarianism would agree. And paying ransoms that only inspire more hostage taking would be idiotic. A more nuanced approach may be to ask what rules should be propagated for the protection and enrichment of society. Given that great suffering comes from paying ransoms, I doubt that any serious Utilitarian would have a problem banning them.
Your only response in this thread has been: I have a child therefore that gives me the right to do anything. You really should spend some time fleshing out your arguments. Because if you truly believe it, then it would apply to anything. You would not be able to criticize any type of nepotism, wealth concentration, or dynastic political propagation if you truly believe that your children are so much more valuable those of others (unless you believe that the ladder should exist for you but that you have the right to pull it up once you’ve ascended). Consider if you were a poor Yazidi trying to protect his or her children. Would your viewpoint still be the same on the right of people to pay ransoms to terrorists?
What, exactly, do you know about paying ransom to get your loved one back?
I’ve watched Fargo.
In the global context, no,they are just another statistics. In the context of my family, HELL YES!!!
And this reference frame distinction applies to pretty much all families.
In the global context, no,they are just another statistics.
Do you have any problem with collateral damage when it comes to war? For example, do you have any issues with Obama killing civilians with drones?
I’m trying to understand how you can dehumanize human beings. Obviously this has been done forever (slaves aren’t humans, exploiting the natives isn’t a problem because we don’t see their suffering, etc.). It is grossly imperialistic and racist. People aren’t statistics, they are human beings. And if you don’t realize this then you don’t have the capability to feel empathy.
Give money to terrorists, and I think you’ll find the US Government has a special place and treatment for you. There is no ‘waiting it out’.
I’m firmly on the side of not paying up. It’s a hard choice, and if it were my child, I would likely be driven mad. I’m not sure if I could continue living, and I am sure I’d shorten my life by drinking heavily and often. But I know also that if I paid a ransom to bring my daughter home, she would know that the money I gave the terrorists was being used to kill more people, and that would surely drive her mad. She might not forgive me for saving her, so I still wouldn’t have her back, and I’d have funded terrorism.
It’s a no-win scenario. The only hope you have of gaining directly is to pick up a gun and go kill the terrorists who have your child. You will probably die before you get close, but you might be lucky enough to directly and negatively impact those responsible. It’s a movie plot certainly, except that in reality, you die, your child dies, maybe a couple of terrorists die, and you didn’t make the problem worse by paying.
and yet you probably pay your taxes.
so you support these atrocities under threat of force (or apathy, or “patriotism”; i’m not sure which), but you say that you wouldn’t do it for love.
